Through a glowing red doorway, visitors enter a room with tacky red wallpaper that recalls the bar’s original snapshots of victims and black-and-white prints of grisly newspaper photographs line the walls. The UpStairs Lounge was, by most accounts, a seedy dive, and the show’s power derives from its ability to place the viewer inside that world.
It was there that New Orleans’s new mayor, LaToya Cantrell, announced the creation of an L.G.B.T. (As a point of contrast: His father, Moon Landrieu, the mayor at the time of the blaze, did not cancel his vacation.) And this year, on the attack’s 45th anniversary, a memorial service was held for the victims. In 2013, the city’s then-mayor, Mitch Landrieu, declared a day of mourning for the victims. Last month the Historic New Orleans Collection held a panel discussion on the incident, which some of the fire’s survivors attended. Over the past few years, two books, two documentaries and even a musical came out about the fire. Fein’s carnage-filled images and ribald tributes to gay life in the early 1970s.Ī renewed interest in the UpStairs Lounge tragedy has been in the air.
And in connecting rooms there is a video footage of funeral processions, which references the Vietnamese diaspora in southern Louisiana, and Mr. Kasimu Harris’s photographs of young black students. In its two-story atrium, below the permanent collection’s European classical paintings, are L. It is part of a new show at the New Orleans Museum of Art, “ Changing Course: Reflections on New Orleans Histories,” a collection of seven projects that, through September, puts the city’s marginalized communities at the forefront of this institution. Now an exhibition by the artist Skylar Fein is shedding light on this macabre and overlooked episode. As time passed, little attention was paid to the victims. (The Pulse nightclub shooting in Orlando, Fla., which killed 49 people, took that grim title in 2016.) Long considered arson, the case remains unsolved the prime suspect, who was never charged, committed suicide a year after the fire. Thirty-one men and one woman died in what was then the largest mass killing of gay people in American history. NEW ORLEANS - In 1973, the UpStairs Lounge, a bar in the French Quarter here, went up in flames one hot summer night.